About GameSetWatch

GameSetWatch.com is the alt.video game weblog and sister site of Gamasutra.com. It is dedicated to collecting curious links and media for offbeat and oft-ignored games from consoles old and new, as well as from the digital download, iOS, and indie spaces.

For those of you aching to play something new, but feel that there's no reason to abandon the Sega Genesis quite yet, your day has come! In the form of Harry Potter and the... To be honest, I'm not certain what the full title exactly is. And the Surin of something?

It's a ROM hack that's been making the rounds as of late, due to a recent eBay auction that was noticed by Game Sniped. Like many games of its kind, half the fun is trying to figure out where all the bits and pieces come from. Gameplay is somewhat reminiscent of Pac-Man, as you roam around semi-recognizable environments that are laid out in a vaguely maze-like fashion, to collect orbs. I guess the orbs are supposed to be flying Snitches, but instead of being gold, they're blue or red. Excuse me for not being intimately familiar with the source material front and back; I read enough to know that Harry gets accosted by grim reaper-type creatures. But pharaohs and sushi chefs? Guess I need to finally read that last book.

Back to the levels: the second one (there's actually only three), the Forbidden Forest, aside from looking oddly bright and cheerful when compared to the original books or movies, has foliage that instantly reminded me of Super Mario RPG or Sonic 3D Blast, given how both were isometric games that utilized pre-rendered CG graphics and all (they were somewhat lame attempts to prove to everyone that SNES and Genesis could still stand toe0to-toe with the Saturn or PSX). Alas Harry Potter's trees are very close, but not exact. Most curious is the music in the third stage, which is the attract mode tune for the original Street Fighter 2 but somewhat expanded upon? Bizarre.

Unfortunately there's no Ron or Hermione or Dumbledore. Oh well. And according to the source of the video, the same person was auctioning off a bootleg version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Featuring Vanna White and Vectorman? One can only wonder.